What Disturbs Me
to find the music in poetry
i put my ear to the page
and waited
waited
the buzzer let me know
my wife wanted in,
so I let her in and waited
waited
while wisps of air walking
thru the window whipped
away the page I was on;
I waited
waited
too long for poetry to sing,
so I whistled some cheap tune
with words the radio
couldn't remember.
Normally, I blather on about the meaningless minutiae of pop culture before dropping some completely unrelated poem like a bomb on my ersatz dissertation. The Gimlet has even gone so far as to name this turn the "typical Nicholas move," but to be honest, I likely learned it, or at least the appeal of the sudden turn in a text, from Montaigne or Anne Carson. I honestly can't remember which.
I was reading Glass, Irony and God just now not paying particular attention to what was being said but more to something that became clear to me at a recent workshop (guess whose!): the idolization of Anne Carson goes beyond your average wide-eyed student and extends well into the ranks of seasoned academics, many of whom I have a deep respect for. I find myself questioning whether that respect was rationally given, because I just don't get it. Generally, I'm not one to dismiss even the poets I don't like, but I have to say, I find her poetry thoroughly soulless. It's like staring into a kaleidoscope: I'm dazzled by the deftness she wields in moving from one image to the next with near surgical precision, but I just don't feel anything. When ODB says, "ooh baby I like it raw; ooh baby I like it RAW!" I feel something, even if that something is mingled with more than a little disgust. Hell, I get more out of "Papa Don't Preach" than I get out of
Everything I know about love and its necessities
I learned in that one moment
when I found myself
thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon
at a man who no longer cherished me.
It doesn't help that as I read I can hear Anne crooning in that nigh monotone of hers that strikes me as the lyric equivalent of Dean Martin. Even if I couldn't, there's no lust in this poetry, not even something like Emily Dickinson's brutally restrained desire. Anne Carson doesn't know how to wield the brutality of words, and her poetry is the only thing that suffers for it. I may be the only one who sees it this way, but I don't care. This poetry is worse than the fluffiest pop music--at least pop songs seem to genuinely value their banalities. This is just banal:
My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.
posted by Nicholas Theisen @ 1:24 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
So, did the poetry workshop go that well?
But seriously, I like your poem that's posted in this diatribe. The only part that I find a bit clunky is the first part of the third stanza. Otherwise, I think it's pretty great.
As for the Carson poems you cite, do you really not feel anything from them? I mean, I certainly don't feel good when I read them, but I feel the repulsion of the everyday things that people are too ashamed to admit they do. And, of course, I recognize my baboon ass. I'm probably exactly quoting what academics have said about her work (especially the baboon part), though, so sorry if I'm pissing you off too much by that.
That being said, the religion poem is total crap, and everyone should recognize that.
This also reminds me of our conversation about The Darjeeling Limited, and how it exerts its effect on an audience by lulling it into complacency and then flipping everything on its head through that funeral scene. I can't help but think that the same thing is at work in these Carson poems: begin with a cliche about something lofty, then expose the dark underside that points to the not so simplistic reasons why people adhere to those cliches. For you, why is it that the Anderson film works, but the Carson poems do not?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?
Part of my distaste for Anne is likely an intentional fallacy: I've met her and had to interact with her personally, so I perhaps subconsciously read a lot of her back into the poems.
I agree that third stanza is clunky; my opinion is the word "wisps" pretty much ruins the first line, not to mention throwing in obvious alliteration into a poem about not "hearing" a text is a rather cheap trick.
My ultimate beef, though, is that the poetry is SO calculated and even goes so far as to point out every little number crunch in those calculations. It makes me exasperated; I feel like A.O. Scott in his recent review of Funny Games: "Mr. Pitt turns to address the audience directly, mocking us for rooting for Ann and George’s survival, deriding our desire for neat resolutions. At these moments, using techniques that might have seemed audacious to an undergraduate literary theory class in 1985 or so, the film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud."
I realize some of my favorite poets do this; it's practically Baudelaire's schtick in Les Fluers du Mal, but lyric subject in Baudelaire's poetry to me, at least, always seems to be aware of the dangers posed by playing such a game. In Anne's case, everything seems to be taken as gnomic, as if her reader will naturally assume everything just is as she says. The difference is when you call out Baudelaire's bullshit, you get a paper published and the proverbial pat on the back. You call out Anne's bullshit, and you will likely but not absolutely be dismissed.
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